CodeSourcery’s defence

Having covered the spectacular failure of CodeSourcery’s latest ARM compiler a few days ago, I was engaged in a curious debate on IRC with one of their employees. Fiercely denying the problem at first, he eventually offered an explanation: they do not test the compiler output on real hardware; they use QEMU.

QEMU is a CPU emulator supporting a variety of targets. While great for casual development, and for running foreign applications, it is certainly no substitute for real hardware when testing a compiler. Like any piece of software, an emulator is bound to have a few errors, and as it happens, QEMU has known bugs in its handling of the NEON instruction set. Our friend at CodeSourcery should be well aware of these, also being a QEMU developer.

The use of emulators was explained as a necessity due to real hardware not being available. To be fair, CodeSourcery does develop against new hardware before it exists, so some reliance on emulators is unavoidable. This is, however, not the case this time. The Beagleboard was made available to selected developers quite some time ago (I have had one since May, others still longer), and is now being sold by the thousands. CodeSourcery developers, so I am told, were also given an offer of a free board, an offer they chose to refuse.

What does all this mean? Did Murphy decide to inflict maximum bad luck on the hard-working developers, or is there perhaps a larger conspiracy at work? I shall not attempt to speculate in this matter. I will merely repeat this excellent piece of advice given by Robert J. Hanlon: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.